


The Arbiter

by Mithrigil



Category: Fate/Zero, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Bromance, Friendship, Gen, Halo 3, Post-Canon, mundane uses of epic magic, video game nerdery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-10
Updated: 2012-04-10
Packaged: 2017-11-03 09:19:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/379796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithrigil/pseuds/Mithrigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If there’s a worse reason to summon a centuries-old hero back to your side than <i>Halo 3</i>, Waver doesn’t know what that reason is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Arbiter

“My, this new game is quite _brown_ ,” Rider says, his huge fingers somehow still deft on the X-Box 360 controller. “Is it because it’s the end of the world?”

Waver shrugs, gives it a moment’s thought, and resumes his slaughter of the Covenant. “It’s because they’re showing off the graphics engine. Wait until you see the stars. Those aren’t brown.”

Rider accepts that answer with a low growl of approval, the kind of sound that wouldn’t be out of place during a volcanic eruption. How someone that size moves his thumbs that fast can only be the work of magic. Good. “Yes, but why brown?”

“Because they think it’s realistic.”

“Ha! Warfare is not brown! It is glorious and vibrant with the flash of steel on bronze and the sheen of your enemies’ blood!”

Waver laughs. He hasn’t laughed like this since he was a teenager, and that’s not as impressive as it sounds. He’s startled by how high and thin it seems in comparison to how he’s laughed since, almost as if his voice hasn’t spent eleven years changing. Really, he’d thought it would be the other way around when he summoned Rider back in the first place.

\--Wait. Waver should probably start this from the beginning.

***

It is a dreary afternoon, and the sun hasn’t shown the last three times it’s risen, and Waver Velvet, Lord El-Melloi II, is bored out of his skull. He is loafing around his chambers wearing yesterday’s pants and last year’s fuzzy moccasins, waiting for the alchemical configuration in the kitchen to turn up either uranium or breakfast (two hours late), and more than slightly hung-over. He’s sure he was drunk for a good reason last night, but can’t remember what it is. Probably something to do with the extended rigmarole of taking the Grail apart: that would drive any man to drink.

He checks the kitchen. It’s still not breakfast. It’s probably not uranium either. God, this would be so much easier if he could just goose the process along, but no, the trouble with alchemitizing radioactive compounds is that they’re even more radioactive before they’re entirely physical, and he can’t just poke the glowing rocks through layers and layers of shields. Damned commissions. Seriously, if he gets cancer from this, or turns into Superman or something, he’ll sue his own organization.

So he drinks the rest of his tea (room temperature now, damn it) and crashes onto the couch. But no, he doesn’t grade his students’ papers or continue the draft of the address he has to give before what’s left of the Tohsaka and Matou families on the Clock Tower’s behalf (which is currently serving as a coaster for his tea): he starts up the 360 and curses how late Halo 3 is because he didn’t think to get a Japanese system instead of European.

Master Chief is looking exceptionally boxy today.

To be fair, gaming helps Waver concentrate. There’s something about twiddling his thumbs and seeing immediate results in the certain death onscreen that clears everything else out of his head. Meditation, kind of. People used to do that with sword drills. Or riding. Rider would have understood. Hell, Rider’s probably the one that told him in the first place, though Waver can’t recall precisely when.

He drops a grenade into a cluster of Covenant. Not being able to recall precisely when bothers him.

The uranium percolates in the kitchen, and Waver gets a wonderful, horrible idea.

***

Summoning is not Waver’s _forte_ , but then, no road is closed to him as Lord El-Melloi II. The Grail Wars are over (if Waver has anything to say about it, which he does, a great deal actually, even though that speech is currently a coaster for tepid tea), and even if they aren’t he sure as hell doesn’t want anyone calling up this particular Servant.

Anyone, that is, but him.

He checks and double-checks the summoning circle once he’s placed the relic inside it. It’s not a sure thing, but he knows his odds of coming up with Rider, his Rider--no, no classes and no Grail War, not Rider, just Iskander, though calling Iskander _just_ anything is like saying Hadrian’s Wall is _just_ a rocky outcropping or the Crown Jewels are _oh, this old thing_.

Like the relic isn’t _just_ the reins of any old Macedonian horse. They were held by that horse’s master in the deserts of Eurasia, and Waver knows it. He was there.

And before he can start thinking about how Rider might well crack him upside the head for this, he begins the incantation.

“I call you not for war,” he says, among other things in other languages that might as well be rolling off an imaginary tongue, “nor for any service. Be not beholden to me, but to the designs of those too great to require you. Be only by my side until the light of the sun crosses the Prime Meridian of this Earth, that I may speak with you as your vassal, and have the counsel I crave. I command no seals and claim no wish, save to hear your voice and feel your presence. I beseech you to my side, King of Conquerors, that thereafter you may stand at my fore as you are meant.”

Bucephalus’s reins crumble to dust as the circle floods with light. Waver’s coat blows back from his shoulders and his hair whips into his eyes, but he’s too strong now to be knocked off his feet. He thinks, distantly, in the part of his mind that isn’t suffused by the ritual, that even if Rider doesn’t come he’d be proud of Waver for having the balls to try.

Perhaps it’s that thought that sends him Rider in the first place. Perhaps it’s not. But sure enough, there he stands, well over halfway to the doubled ceiling and nearly as broad as the circle with his arms flung wide, announcing himself nearly the same way he did eleven years ago --

Except, this time, to say, “Waver! Long time! Damn, you look like someone dragged you up the stairs of Hell.”

Waver stutters out a laugh. If he staggers a few steps forward, he’s sure Rider notices, but he doesn’t care. “It worked,” Waver says, because everything else he planned to say has flown clean out of his head.

“Of course it worked. I haven’t seen you cast a spell that didn’t work.” Rider grins, strides forward out of the circle. His cape smears it along the way, blows the ashes of the relic aside. And before Waver can notice anything else done or undone, new or old, there’s a familiar arm wrapped around strangely unfamiliar shoulders, and where there used to be a chokehold there’s a more even embrace. “You got tall.”

“Tall enough,” Waver says, his hands tentative on Rider’s cape. There’s no way it could dissipate, but Waver supposes that logic hasn’t caught up with his hands yet. Rider is _here_ , and there’s nothing that can move him from wherever he is, so Waver should stop worrying and touch him.

“Tall enough!” Rider laughs, beats Waver to the punch and, well, punches him on the back. It hurts less than it used to, even if Waver didn’t expect it. “Tall enough for a scholar, maybe. Come! Where’s your sense of hospitality! Food, first, and then tell me everything that’s transpired in my absence. Ha-ha, didn’t teach you anything, did I?”

“-- Wine,” Waver manages. “There’s wine upstairs. And food. Soon.”

***

Predictably, like everything else a king does in superlatives, Rider eats the spiciest curry. Waver orders from his favorite of the local curriers so he doesn’t have to waste time troubling the cook or the maid. The wine, though, Waver had on hand, and Rider polishes off the first bottle like he hasn’t had anything so good in weeks. Waver decides not to tell him where he got it, or, more pointedly, who he got it from.

The curry arrives with appreciable alacrity and Rider digs in to dish after dish while Waver regales him with everything that’s happened the past eleven years, and the past two years in particular. Rider isn’t terribly surprised that the Grail itself had a stake in its own outcome, but the rest is fascinating enough that he sits and listens around mouthfuls of naan.

“And either way, the wars are done for good,” Waver finishes. “I’ve got a few more people to yell at and a few more walls to beat my head against until they come down. But it’s done. They’re done. No more Grail.”

Rider assents with a low rumbling hum, more in his chest than his throat. If Waver weren’t across the table from him, he’d feel it instead of hear it. “Good for you! If what you say is true, then you have bested a mighty adversary indeed.”

“There is no mightier adversary than bureaucracy,” Waver says. He remembers, belatedly, that time Rider watched the Clinton re-election campaign in Fuyuki and said that Clinton, not another Servant, was the greatest obstacle on the way to global dominion. Oh, if only he knew.

Rider laughs, toasts, sprawls back in his chair. “If I didn’t know you were making a joke, I’d correct you.”

“It’s pretty true, for a joke.” Waver fidgets , flicks at a grain of rice that’s somehow made it out of the takeout boxes and onto the table. “Fighting Caster was easier.” _But Archer wasn’t,_ he thinks, but doesn’t dare say aloud.

“The best jokes are true,” Rider says, undaunted, pouring vindaloo onto his bread. “Did I ever tell you the one about the cup-bearer and the bullhorn?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, what about the one about the krater full of hot wax?”

“Yes.”

“A good one! But what about the oracle with the extra--”

 _”Yes,”_ Waver says.

“--they never did find that gerbil,” Rider grins, wipes his hand on the tablecloth before he reaches over and knocks his (thankfully not curried) fist on Waver’s forehead. “Why did you call me here, if there’s no war to fight and you’ve already heard all my best jokes?”

 _Just to talk_ sounds as ridiculous as _just Iskander_ , so Waver says nothing. He uses a long gulp of wine as an excuse to think about what’s all right to say, what does and doesn’t make him look stupid.

And then he remembers, it’s _Rider_. Even a King’s ridiculousness is superlative.

“I’ve got a new video game,” Waver says.

Rider slaps the table. “Excellent!”

***

Which brings him more or less to where he is, sprawled on the couch with Rider sitting cross-legged on a pile of cushions on the floor in front of him, as the world of Halo’s bleak, brown future floods Waver’s forty-eight-inch flatscreen TV. Waver is playing the Arbiter to Rider’s Master Chief, which really is how it should be, with the exception of Keith David’s low (perfect) voice (which is now how Waver thinks Rider might sound with an American accent, and, well, less shouting). Rider laughs and plunges into the fray as soon as the opening cinematics are over, callused thumbs scratching audibly on the rotators of his controller.

“It seems you have the advantage over me, if you’ve played this before.” He grins once he’s gunned down a cluster of Covenant. “But I shall find you and have your pixilated head!”

Waver laughs. “It’s not PVP, it’s collaborative. We’re going for the same objective.”

“Oh, so it’s like that one with the two dragons.”

“Double Dragon, yeah.”

“Then you had better keep up with me! Swear now that you will not be left behind when the screen scrolls to the side.”

“Doesn’t work like that,” Waver sighs, “but don’t worry, I’ve got this covered. I won’t let you down.”

“Then let’s go! No time to squat upon the faces of the fallen.”

***

Hours pass, and they run through all four bottles of wine (which means, almost certainly, that Waver has had one and Rider the other three), and another cinematic rolls and interrupts their progress. Waver takes advantage of this to light himself a cigarette, which Rider views with some interest. Waver wonders if the king must smoke in superlatives too. Maybe he should break out the cigars.

“So this system is Live, as you say.”

“Yeah.” Waver drags an ashtray over so he doesn’t have to use the old teacup or the wine glass and look, well, like someone who uses wine glasses for ashtrays. “If we changed modes we could go up against anyone in the world.”

“More uncharted territory.” Rider puts down his controller to polish off the wine in his glass. Waver should probably buzz up for more, though he’s definitely had enough that Halo is starting to have, well. A halo. “Have you tried to conquer the world of this X-Box Live yet?”

“Not yet.” Waver laughs. The smoke sears his throat, already dry from the wine. Rider is still looking at him and the cigarette, so Waver takes one more drawl and hands it over. The tiny curl of paper looks absurd in Rider’s enormous hands, but he smokes like he knows how, without coughing, and hands it back.

“Not yet!” Rider claps his hand onto Waver’s knee, as much approval in the gesture as the words. “But it is a place that can be conquered, real or not.”

Waver reaches down and puts his hand on top of Rider’s before he takes it away. He missed this; not that he hasn’t had any physical contact at all through the years, casual and otherwise, but it’s easy, natural, to miss Rider. No one else in the world has skin like that, has blood that beats so powerfully under the surface and sandblasted creases and cracks like an old favorite jacket.

It might be the wine. It might not. But Waver only lifts his hand off Rider’s when the cherry of the cigarette gets a little too close, and Halo demands Rider’s attention once again.

“Watch out for those flaming bullhorns,” Rider says.

“Traffic cones,” Waver corrects.

“Ah, yes! The tools of caution, turned into weapons by your foolhardiness!”

***

Midnight rolls past, and then one o’clock, and another two bottles of wine are perched empty at the base of Rider’s floor cushions. The sounds of alien slaughter fill the room like cicadas in autumn and Waver slumps forward, dares to put his shin against Rider’s shoulders.

“Five wars is more than enough,” Waver says.

“Five of those wars, perhaps,” Rider says, moving Master Chief in position to move to the next are once Waver catches up. “Peace can be earned. I believe I told you as much once.”

“You did.”

“Much easier through the destruction of your enemies, but yes, it can be earned.”

“Most of them are already destroyed,” Waver says. “At least, their objectives are.”

“Wishes never die,” Rider says.

Waver has the Arbiter shoot up a console and thinks, for a moment, that this is why Halo has three sequels and counting.

“Has yours changed?” Rider asks, in all seriousness but edged with amusement, like his laughter is as much a part of him as Mana and blood.

“Not really,” Waver admits. “I mean, I’ve gotten the recognition I wanted, but I’m not sure that was my wish in the first place.”

“Of course not. I thought the same, when I was as young as you were. To be thought of as the mightiest matters less when you _are_ the mightiest. You wanted them to acknowledge your talents only because the scope of that wish wasn’t fully revealed to you yet.”

A section of the Ark of the Covenant explodes onscreen, in all its digital glory. “I’m not a conqueror,” Waver says.

“Yes, you are,” Rider says. “But you’re not a king.”

Waver tries not to slow the Arbiter down, but between the sound effects engine and Rider’s voice, it’s hard to split his mind, so he doesn’t.

“To command respect is to conquer the hearts of those who would oppose your ascent. You may not take their land and command their service, but commanding their respect is conquering all the same. I would expect no less of any of my soldiers.”

Waver’s thumbs shudder, and onscreen the Arbiter narrowly dodges a hail of light and shrapnel. There are words to say, but damned if he knows what they are, or remembers what they should be.

“And look at you now!” Rider takes his hand off the controller, reaches back and gives Waver a solid clap on the knee. “You got what you wanted, but you’re far from done. Boundless deserts! Invisible oceans! Grab that ammunition, the Arbiter needs it more than I do. I sense a boss battle around that corner!”

He’s right, of course. About the boss battle. And everything else. But Waver doesn’t say anything to that effect, since, well. Boss battle. And truth.

But since Master Chief is bearing the brunt of this fight (and Rider has no right to be as good with the controls as he is, what, do they have X-Boxes wherever Servants go when they die?), Waver drifts, and fixes, and puts his hands on autopilot.

There are only two ways he can ever see Rider again, after this. He could scour Macedonia for traces of him, relics like the reins, and call him up again, like this, for something like this, however long it takes from now. The thought’s like spinach in his teeth.

But the other way--the other way, he hopes he can earn, like he earned the Command Seals in the first place. Because to ride with the Ionian Hetairoi after his death would be greater than any respect he could ever attain on Earth.

He doesn’t ask. And the boss goes down in pixilated light, to the tune of Rider’s taunts and laughter.

***

Rider nudges him awake, and it’s not so much a nudge as a wallop on the shoulder. Waver snurfles and pulls the blankets a little closer before he realizes they’re not blankets, they’re Rider’s cape, and he’s hanging off the couch all the way to Rider’s abandoned pile of cushions. It’s dawn, and the Halo 3 load screen plays on loop. 

“I’ll be on my way soon,” Rider says. “The game was excellent. I thought you might want to say good-bye.”

“I don’t,” Waver says, or thinks he says.

Rider laughs and ruffles Waver’s hair. The long strands lift into the air between their faces and flow through nothing, once Rider’s hand fades. His armor glows, and his cape flaps in a wind that Waver can’t feel at all, and a desert stretches out between them.

Even translucent, even absent, Rider still fills the room, like a king should. Waver lies back down on the couch, and basks in it.

***


End file.
